Editorial: Brussels reveals our lack of strategy

Sunday

Mar 27, 2016 at 12:01 AM

Last weekend Lakeland city officials and U.S. military personnel unveiled the city's new Global War on Terrorism Freedom Memorial in Veterans Memorial Park. The simple design — a rifle positioned upright between a pair of combat boots and topped with a Kevlar helmet — recalls that America's longest war initially began as a simple mission: to hunt down and capture, or kill if necessary, the culprits behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The monument was dedicated to the sacrifice of troops like Ron Payne Jr., a U.S. Marine corporal killed in combat in Afghanistan in May 2004. Aileen Payne, Payne's mother, told those gathered at the dedication ceremony: "There's a fear that people will forget. This helps us to remember. People do care and appreciate the price of freedom and the families who've lost their children."

Of course we owe our gratitude to, and should never forget, men and women like Cpl. Payne, a two-sport athlete who graduated from Mulberry High School who fulfilled a lifelong dream by becoming a Marine. He is, after all, one of nearly 6,900 American troops who paid the ultimate price in Iraq and Afghanistan since we launched our wars there 15 years ago. Sadly, however, we didn't need Lakeland's newest monument to valorous military veterans to understand the war that Cpl. Payne volunteered to fight in our stead is still ongoing.

The terrorists themselves offered a jarring reminder just three days after the event in Lakeland.

Last Tuesday, a handful of ISIS militants set off a chain of suicide bombs at the airport and a subway station in Brussels, Belgium, killing at least 31 people, including two Americans from New York City, and injuring more than 300 others. "This is just the beginning of your nightmare," Abu Abdullah al-Beljiki, an ISIS fighter from Belgium, vows in a video released by the terrorist group shortly after the bombings.

The Pentagon tried to counterbalance last week's gut-wrenching images of the bombings — body parts strewn among the rubble, dazed and bleeding victims seeking help, mourners laying flowers — by announcing that the No. 2 leader in ISIS, Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, had been killed by U.S. commandos.

That's welcome news. But it also reminds us that our incoherent, anti-ISIS strategy in the Middle East is failing.

Last week Brussels simply became the latest in a string of murderous attacks inspired or initiated by ISIS. While the citizens of Iraq, Syria and Libya have died by the hundreds over the past three years in facing the brunt of the group's violent push to establish a caliphate in that region, vivid evidence exists that its tentacles can reach far outside that realm: Paris (twice last year), San Bernardino, the downing of the Russian Metrojet Flight 9268.

Many people may not recall this, but we have been bombing ISIS-held positions nearly around the clock for the past 18 months. In December President Barack Obama maintained that U.S.-backed forces were “hitting (ISIS) harder than ever.” “As we squeeze its heart we'll make it harder for ISIL (ISIS) to pump its terror and propaganda to the rest of the world,” Obama told reporters. He added that the strategy is progressing with a “great sense of urgency.” Those comments, however, came days after Marine Gen. Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee, “We have not contained” ISIS.

Brussels just proved who has the better handle on the situation in the Middle East.

The problem with the president's strategy is that no one really knows what it is, probably including Obama. Airstrikes are part of it, we know, but they often bring collateral damage that only fuels ISIS recruitment efforts. Augmenting those bombings are targeted special operations missions aimed at decapitating ISIS. But if we have learned anything from 40 years of the domestic war on drugs it is that cutting of the head of a snake doesn't kill it; it only creates a vacuum that is quickly filled by another thug.

Congress passed a law last year that required Obama to submit his ISIS strategy to lawmakers by Feb. 15. It arrived on Friday. The report, though only seven pages, still landed with a thud. Rep. Mac Thornberry, a Texas Republican who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, said the plan contained nothing new and was short on details. Not surprising. Our actions today are the same as when we first directed the military's energy at ISIS in August 2014.

We're in a dilemma. The leading presidential contenders won't do anything different than Obama. And the country shows no appetite for sending tens of thousands of more young troops like Cpl. Payne into the meat grinder to silence this threat once and for all. For now, it seems, all we can do is watch Obama's slow-motion disaster to continue to unfold and pray it doesn't hit near us.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.